Weeding

For three days, it rained. It rained even on the map of Wisconsin, the 3-D topographical one my husband bought that I left rolled on a table by an open window. I spread the map out on the carpet in the hall and flattened it with books. Each day in the morning, the dog and I went for a long walk. We spent the afternoons, the three of us—me, the dog, and the map—drying out.

And then it stopped. The dog, with her rump sticking high out of a mound of stones and chunks of old barn foundation piled at the back of our yard, focused on the premeditated murder of a chipmunk. My husband chain-sawed a maple limb that had come down. Completely hollow, the limb was the outer half of the one that holds our tire swing, which still hung, daring us to use it.

I went to work on the strawberries, which I had been picking, moist and not that sweet, in between downpours all week. I like picking them more, I think, than eating them. The kneeling search, the joy of finding one red all the way around with no mouse nibbles, the plucking and filling of bowls and baskets satiates something other than physical hunger. But tonight, I left the berries be. It was work-time. The patch needed tending.

I pulled up the white campion and lawn-grass that had invaded and rose above the canopy of this strawberry forest. And somewhere in the middle, the leaves I parted revealed a small nest, its cup three to four inches in diameter, made of the same grass clippings I mulch my garden with. Inside were five barely blue, brown-flecked eggs. The mother and father were nowhere around, but I have seen them—song sparrows—in the trees at the back of the yard.

When I come upon something like this—a nest of eggs, a turtle, two fox kits playing in a field that bark and separate when they see me—though I know it is happenstance, it makes me think of a silly analogy: it is like the first time one sees a friend in his or her pajamas, the first time that friend comes to your house, opens the refrigerator door without asking, and commences to eat. It is an indication of closeness, of shared space and resources, a treasured proximity.

For three days, it rained. Tonight the sky opened and turned blue. The garden needed weeding. I did too.